Can someone point me in the direction of some good historical reading about pedagogy in medieval Europe? I'd be particularly interested in writings that go into some detail about the mundane aspects of schooling, especially the materials typically used, the way lessons were structured, and what a student was expected to do. Obviously I'd be most interested in a historian who used source materials dating from the approximate time and place the VMS was written, but I'd be happy with just a general overview of pedagogy in the early fifteenth century, for those fortunate enough to receive any schooling at all.
What inspired me to want to look up medieval educational methods is that I noticed a number of clues about the VMS would fit together nicely if it were a student's notebook. I'd like to explore and flesh out this hypothesis a bit more (or abandon it if it keeps crashing into anachronisms), but I need to know more about the historical background of the Alpine region of Europe at the time, particularly who learned the arts / sciences / "natural law", and how they learned it.
Something else entirely, for those more experienced with handwriting than me. I've only recently learned about the IHS Christogram through this thread. I just noticed that (I know it's a stretch) it's kind of present in the scribble inside the large "sun"-flower on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . This would leave a protrusion on top and a mark at the bottom though.
I think it's time we fish this out of the depths of the off topic section and give it its own proper thread.
Anton suggested that investigating word entropy would be an interesting exercise. Thanks to Nablator's code I gathered some initial data, which can be viewed in my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. under the word entropy tab.
What I did right now is make some quick graphs to see whether there is any signal in the noise. My favorite way of visualizing lots of data is in scatter plots, so that's what I used. For the second value I used MATTR 500, because I know this forms "language clouds", and additionally I wanted to find out whether there would be any correlation between this and word entropy (both are about vocabulary, after all).
Also, I wanted to get an idea of which values might be most useful to focus on.
Note: in most graphs, I left two VM outliers, those are te labels and the GC transcription. It is best to focus on the main VM cloud, which sits somewhere between Latin and German.
Note2: Greek is usually somewhere in the middle, but since there are so many dots of it, visibility is impaired, so I turned it off for these graphs.
An effect is visible, but less pronounced than in h1-h2.
Conclusion: Voynichese does not behave abnormally as far as word entropy goes. It sits somewhere between Latin and German. Some other languages like Italian and Slavic are also close, but I didn't include those in these graphs.
Are there good clues as to what direction and order the strokes of each Voynichese character was drawn?
I'm a word and language nerd who has studied Chinese and Japanese as second languages, including the closely related writing systems for both. The key to mastering Chinese characters is mastering, and adhering to, the rules about how strokes are drawn. These rules were formulated over centuries of the brush and paper becoming the preferred writing media in China, and ensure that the result is as legible and aesthetically pleasing as possible. In short, for those curious:
[*]Every character is a uniform sized square, no matter how many strokes
[*]General progress in writing a character is from the upper left corner of the square to the bottom right
[*]Ticks and tails can go off in any direction, but straight lines should only ever be drawn left to right and/or top to bottom
[*]Begin an enclosure, draw the interior, then close the enclosure
As with really any writing system, reading cursive Chinese characters is really a matter of recognizing the order in which the strokes were drawn. Draw them differently, and the character will likely be hard to read.
I've never learned to do calligraphy in any script or language, and I'm certainly not as versed in it as many of you here who have looked at a lot of old manuscripts. But it's on my list of things to learn when I retire, and it's an art I've always had an appreciation for. The argument was made in the basic character decomposition thread that the scribes of the VMS were likely used to writing cursive, not book hand, and the VMS character set looks cursive-ish. This should be helpful, then, for looking for the stroke qualities typical of the pen's starting point, ending point, and general direction.
Which brings me to my next question: Do we have any good idea what kind of writing utensil the scribe used, and how it was likely wielded? This should be an easy question for our paleography gurus here. I only bring this up because the writing utensil and medium of choice had a major effect on the development of most scripts. The Chinese script, as I mentioned, was shaped by the a revulsion to pushing a paintbrush against its bristles, by a hand that never made contact with the paper during the writing process. The Thai script was designed to be easy to scratch on palm leaves. If the VMS represents a lost script of perhaps a lost language, it is possible that it was a script originally designed to be written with a different type of utensil on a different type of medium. This could explain why it is left-leaning and not full of strong vertical lines. Also if the traditional writing medium was not durable, and the users of this script had no custom of putting writing on anything durable (or even making anything durable at all) due, that might explain why only one item has been found that uses it.
In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., focusing on the specific subset of zodiac labels, Rene observed that words that are very common in the text do not appear in labels.
In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., considering the whole set of all labels in the manuscript, I observed that common words are very rare in single-word labels, but more frequent in multi-word labels (bottom of this post).
In this thread, I will try to collect some more information about multi-word labels. It is not a huge set, so it should be relatively easy to examine it in detail. My ambition is to also consider other manuscripts, seeing what readable labels can suggest about the labels in the VMS. I expect I will make errors, but I am sure that the subject is interesting and maybe others will carry on the task with more accuracy. Rene's approach of focusing on a single section is likely more robust, but for this first post I considered all the labels together. Separately examining label subsets is one of the things I hope to do in later posts.
In order to have a first readable manuscript to compare with, I have transcribed the labels in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (see attachment). I encountered a number of difficulties in the process:
* I opted for expanding all the abbreviations I could interpret, so that the text in the labels can be compared with normal Latin. This was not an easy choice, and I understand that a diplomatic transcription would have had its advantages too.
* The labels are written in several different hands. I only considered those that seemed to me reasonably close to the hand who wrote the main text.
* Labels are often interrupted by the image of a plant. I considered the two halves as a single label.
* Labels sometimes occur on two lines: I considered these as two distinct labels (I understand that this is also what Voynich transcriptions do).
* In a few cases, there are labels for illustrations that were never drawn. I still included these in my transcription.
* It is not always clear what should be considered a label. For instance, some include as many as seven words.
In total, 232 labels were transcribed.
I compared the set with the 1023 lines marked L (label) in the Zandbergen-Landini VMS transcription, both ignoring and considering uncertain spaces (commas). A handful of labels corresponding to special characters were ignored.
The following histogram compares the number of words in the sets of labels. The numbers are presented as percentages: keep in mind that the VMS has many more labels than Egerton 747. Single-word labels are about 888-926 (with and without uncertain spaces) vs 147 in Egerton 747. In the VMS, labels with 4 or more words are extremely rare (at most 4 in total) and will not be discussed in this post.
I also examined the position of the most frequent word in multi-word labels. In order to assess the frequency of the text in Egerton 747, I typed about 1000 words from those parts of the transcription of the manuscript published by Iolanda Ventura that are available on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Of course such a small text is not enough to measure frequencies, in particular with Latin that has so many different word-types. So I relied on a composite lexicon made of the small fragment from Egerton 747 and more extensive parts of the Vulgate Bible, Virgil's Aeneid and Mattioli's commentary on Dioscorides, collecting a total number of words (tokens) comparable with that of the Voynich transcriptions (about 38,000 words).
Most common word in two word labels
The following is the position of the most frequent word for labels made of two words. The counts for two-word labels in the three sets are:
While in the Tractatus the most frequent word tends to appear in the second position, in the VMS it tends to appear in the first. In the Latin text, the two positions typically correspond to different stypes of plant names:
* Most common word in the first position (the less frequent case). The name of the plat is made of a noun and an adjective, both words make integral part of the plant's name. E.g.: pes leporinus (hare's foot)
In other cases, the first word is the generic type of plant and the second word the specific name: arbor abiete (arbor=tree, abiete=fir: fir tree) herba vitis (herba=plant, vitis=grapevine: grapevine plant)
* Most common word in the second position (twice as frequent as the other case). Typically, the first word is a specific plant name; the second word is an adjective that identifies a variant of the plant "family". Examples: centaurea maior (greatest centaurea) papaver nigrum (black poppy) vitis alba (white vine) centaurea, papaver, vitis are plant names maior, nigrum, alba are generic adjectives that are obviously more common words.
In most cases (68%), 2-word labels are made of a noun followed by an adjective: of course, both words are in the nominative case and agree in gender and number. Labels that consist of two nouns (6%) also are in the nominative case and tend to have the same gender. A few cases feature a first noun in the nominative case and a second one in the genitive (e.g. sponsa solis, the wife of the sun).
A possible task for future posts could be checking if 2-word labels in the VMS exhibit signs of extensive concordance (e.g. sharing the same suffix).
Most common word in three word labels
Counts of three-words labels:
16 ZL VMS ignoring uncertain spaces
27 ZL VMS with uncertain spaces
17 Egerton 747
The Tractatus only shows that the most common word tends not to occur at the end: it is frequent both in the first and central position.
* Most common word in the first position. 6 of the 8 occurrences follow the pattern "nomen herbe/herba X".
* Most common word in the central position. 4 of the 7 occurrences present two different names for one plant, separated by a disjunction ("sive" / "vel" two occurrences each).
f.18r.1 brusci sive bruscus
f.40r.2 fragia sive fragula
f.74v.1 tapinum vel pinea
f.92r.2 sauma vel brachteos
* Most common word in the last position. The only two cases actually are labels that are split on two lines (f.5r, f.52v).
The VMS shows a preference to present the most common word in the central position. It is tempting to speculate that this might be due to the presence of a disjunction, but this does not seem likely. The most obvious check is seeing if the central word in Voynich 3-word labels tends to be constant, or at least clearly biased towards a limited set of choices, but this is not the case. Among the 27 labels in the ZL-with-uncertain-spaces transcription, only two words repeatedly appear in the central position, and each only appears twice: ar and char. They also appear consecutively in one of the labels:
<f69r.9,&L0> dcho char ar
Also, nothing as simple as the "nomen herbe ..." pattern seems to occur in Voynich 3-word labels.
If the text in the Voynich is highly structured, but meaningless then wouldn't it in fact have been easier to just use a simple cipher to write text that was meaningful. Why would one prefer a meaningless text to one which was written in a cipher unless one had no knowledge of ciphers?
I have noticed a behaviour that is easy to succumb to and quite common and that is the practice of scouring manuscripts for images that look very loosely similar to the image in the Voynich that one is interested in and then postulating a relationship. It is perfectly reasonable to look for a correspondence to images in the Voynich amongst other sources and sometimes this can be very productive, but it should not be pursued to the extent of the man spotting Jesus's face in a pizza. I think, as with Nick Pelling's block-paradigm idea, we should not doubt the extent to which the output of the author's work was original and that a given drawing in the Voynich may not have a parallel in another manuscript.
I just took a decent look at the root of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the first time, and I can't make heads nor tails of it. Well, I can make a tail, which is (I hope) rather clearly suggested in the bottom-right appendage. Tuft at the end and all, like the standard "feline" root tail. There are also tufts of fur indicated along the "body' and the top knot.
What I noticed for the first time today is the pattern that's in the negative on the bottom, as if it's half submerged in waves? I highlighted the area below:
Apart from that, I don't know what to make of the other wiggly looking appendages and the strange angular shapes, nor the thing on top of the root that looks like a hairy square with rounded corners. The leftmost part of the rood is vaguely claw-like, but not terribly convincingly so.
The leaves look relatively realistic. In another thread, JKP suggested Malva, so the image may be based on this plant or a similar one.
The flower though, does not look realistic at all, its size, shape, proportions and components are all off to some degree. The lower pattern is that used for mountains, and above it what I think is "an event in the sky". The "sky" part even appears somewhat elevated above the "land" part. I have no idea about the red structure or a possible meaning of it all.
Has anyone collected data on which pages share most vocabulary? Specifically, I'd like to know when I select a page (for example f1v), which other folios share the most different word types with it?
(Note: both VViews and JKP have written a lot about this subject, and there are also the Sozomeno drawings Rene posted, so see this as an addition rather than something completely new).
While browsing the Très Riches Heures illustrations (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) I noticed that the main drawings on certain pages had been framed with architectural elements. Pillars with statues on pedestals, sometimes wooden bows flanked by two figures spanning the top.
Examples:
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The role of these figures appears to be that of "thematically appropriate onlooker", for example with Job there are living Dead, with David armored knights. There often is a certain hierarchy in the figures' vertical position, with heavenly beings at the top (cfr. VM cloud band figures).
These rich frames are typical for books of hours of the first half of the 15th century. A turning point came in the 1450's with Jean Fouquet, who considered borders a waste of space and treated each manuscript page as a painter would his canvas. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The nymphs in Q13A (using Claston's term) have some similarities with these architectural frames. They each stand like a statue on a base - free-floating nymphs are very exceptional). Some pages use the motif of the wooden beam on top. Some pages use pillars to connect them vertically, though the water makes them more like tubes. My personal impression is that the VM illustrator(s) took the main illustrations and tucked them away in what looks like an architectural frame. While they clearly allude to a style less rich than that of the Très Riches Heures, it is possible that they were imitating this manner of framing.
For me though (and this is where disagreement might arise), they really appear as illustrations in their own right, creating some tension between layout and contents.